YAPC::Europe 2013 “Future Perl”

Day minus 1. Pre-conference stuff

12/08/13 00:20 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees,

There were two events today, the Perl 6 hackathon and the pre-conference meeting. We had not chance yet to talk to the Perl 6 guys and ask them what did they do yesterday, we hope to do that later and hope they did a nice job and had a lot of -Ofun moments despite all the problems with the internet and the electricity in this part of the city.

The pre-conference meeting seemed to be bigger that we could predict and was a pleasant for all the participant. We occupied not only the whole second floor of the cafe but also a pub nearby.

So, now the main part of the conference starts. Tomorrow we begin at 10 with Larry's keynote just after a short intro to the conference and how it will go.

Don't be late, be on time :-) You may access the venue from 9 o'clock in the morning to get your T-shirt, your conference badge holder etc.

See you tomorrow!

Day minus 2. YAPC in the city

10/08/13 23:30 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe 2013 attendees,

The conference starts on Monday but the first activities related with the conference take place already tomorrow.

More and more people arrives to Kiev, and if you are in the centre you might meet Perl people on street. Some of them wear T-shirts from the previous Perl events like YAPCs and local Perl hackathons.

If you happened to arrive to Borispil airport in the afternoon you probably have suffered from a substantial delays because of the enormous crowds before the passport control and in the baggage claim area. We hope that that is the only negative experience you could have during your journey.

If you stay in the Dnipro hotel and would like to hang out with people, try finding them either in the lobby or in Munich bar on the 4th floor.

Tomorrow we open a day with the Perl 6 hackathon which takes place in the Byzantium conference room of Dnipro hotel. This event starts at 10 a.m. and ends at 6 p.m., one our before the next event, the pre-confernece meeting starting at 7 p.m. See more details (address and some pictures for easy recognition) in our recent newsletter.

Enjoy!

Day minus 3. Hot in the city

09/08/13 08:09 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees,

The conference is almost here!

Those of you who are already in Kiev might have noticed that it's really hot here these days. It was +31 ˚C at 8 p.m. Imagine what happened in the midday.

Having this fact in mind, we checked once again if the air conditioning in the venue works well. We were assured it does.

But that's not all. We ordered three coolers and thus we will have drinking water throughout the day, you don't have to wait until the next coffee break or lunch.

Also, we (once again, for the third time now) increased the order for the river cruise to include more refreshing drinks.

From other stuff, we've seen a lot of work has been doing in the conference rooms to install chairs and provide us with enough AC sockets. The restaurant has their forks ready :-)

Today we received a few boxes with the conference T-shirts. The funny thing, the Perl 7 ones were laying on top of one of the boxes :-)

If you are coming to the Perl 6 hackathon, take a time to read the wiki page about it.

Finally, we'd like to thank our new Silver Sponsor, uCoz! It is a good example showing that it is never late to support a Perl event.

Day minus 4. Arrivals

09/08/13 02:26 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees,

Some of you might already have arrived to Kiev. It's really nice here these days although it may be a bit hot in the afternoon.

If you arrive early you may want to check what you can see in Kiev. Refer to the wiki pages on the conference site for more details.

Larry Wall has arrived today, so don't be late at the conference as he is giving the Keynote on Monday morning.

We keep getting more and more committed attendees, which makes us happy :-)

A short sleep and tomorrow (formally, already today) morning we will have to collect some stuff for the conference, inspect the venue and the ship, pick up somebody at the airport and another hundred of small but important things.

See you, maybe even occasionally on the streets of Kiev.

Day minus 5. A brief update

07/08/13 23:42 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees,

Five days left before the conference, four days before the pre-conference meeting. Some of the attendees are already in Kiev. The time flies!

Today we did another bunch of small things to make the conference better.

We were examining the possibility to have enough (actually, even more than enough) AC sockets in the venue and the talk rooms. There were a funny story when I asked if there are enough AC sockets in the venue in Riga in 2011, and they said "Yes" and bought about 200 extension cords, which gave an AC socket for every seat in the front rows. Now we have these cords in Kiev :-)

Good news! There will be a Speakers room in the venue. If you speak, you may prepare your talk in a quiet room.

We have finalised the contract with the catering company (as well as with the restaurant for the pre-conference meeting, and the river boat a day ago).

We see that 220 people opened their conference tickets. We hope that you all print it at home and we will avoid the queues and other unpleasant stuff in the venue during the check-in. By the way, don't forget to check in on Foursquare.

If you stay in Dnipro hotel, you may use their public computer room to print a ticket. Ask at the reception of how to get there.

Also, there's one more talk in the schedule. Thomas Klausner (‎domm‎) gives a talk about ‎ZeroMQ‎.

That's mostly all for today.

See you very very soon!

Day minus 6. Tickets available

06/08/13 12:35 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees,

Six days left before the conference (and even fewer before the pre-conference activity).

Today we have passed the level of 300 committed attendees. Which means there will be more than 300 people at the conference and even more on the boat during the river cruise!

We also enlarged the order that we made earlier for the pre-conference meeting. You are welcome to join.

The printing company said they have printed the welcome banner with logos of all the sponsors that made the conference easier to organise. We will collect it tomorrow.

We are answering more and more questions from the attendees about different bits connected with the conference, such as money in Ukraine, partner programme, hotels etc. Please refer to the conference wiki pages where you can find some useful information.

There's one new talk in the schedule, Perl and SSH, to replace one that was unexpectedly removed by the author. We would like to thank Salvador Fandiño for his readiness to give one more talk to fill this gap.

Finally, you can now print your conference badge which also serves a conference ticket. Print it at home, cut it along the gray line and you will get your own badge :-) We will have a pile of transparent plastic badge holders in the venue. If you cannot find the link to the conference ticket, this most probably means that you did not purchase the ticket yet.

See you soon in Kiev!

Day minus 7. We saved the world today

05/08/13 17:47 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Seven days before the conference. And today was a day with hundreds of things we had to settle. There was a time two or three month ago when we thought that everything was done. Today it was quite opposite :-)

What did we do today? We discussed the details of the venue with the sponsors who will have their desks in the main hall. We did some payments for the venue and the river cruise. We made up a welcome banner with the sponsor logotypes. We ordered plastic holders for the badges. We started finalising the menu, because we have to report to the catering company the exact number of the attendees by Wednesday. We ordered a number of soft sitting places for the hall.

Once again, we fixed the schedule (and we will continue doing that) to ensure the balance between the number of the attendees of the talk and the room capacity. By the way, it's an interesting fact that the total duration of accepted talks is exactly 50 hours. 50 hours and 0 minutes.

To help you navigate among the talk we recommend you to read today's article by Dave Cross in Josetteorama with the preview of the conference.

See you very soon in Kiev!

Week minus 1. Schedule

03/08/13 11:29 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees,

The conference starts in a few days, and we are happy to make the schedule publicly available: act.yapc.eu/ye2013/schedule.

There are three days full of talks, most of the time the talks go in three parallel tracks. There are also a few “single-threaded” events, such as Larry's keynote or lightning talk sessions.

Please examine the schedule and add the talks that you would like to listen to to your personal schedule (by clicking a star). This simple action will help both the speakers and the organisers. For the speakers, it will give the idea of how popular their talk is. For us, it is a help to understand if it's wise to move the talk to the bigger main room.

Although the schedule has been published, we still may make small changes, like the one mentioned above, for better conference flow. We also recommend you to consult the online version of the schedule during the conference itself.

We compiled the schedule in such a way so there are 10 minute gaps between talks. This is done to let everybody easily change rooms and to have some time for the speaker to prepare before the talk.

There are two coffee breaks and a lunch every day. These will be served in the venue so you will not be in rush to find the cafe nearby. This food is completely free of charge for all the committed attendees (including the speakers, of course). If you did not buy your ticket yet, please do it asap, as we have to report the final menu to the restaurant in a couple of days. It is not possible to extend the ordered amount after that date.

On Sunday 11 August, there will be the Perl 6 hackathon. Please note that this event takes place in the Dnipro hotel, not in the venue. The hotel is located 150 meters away from the venue and is the one where more than 30 attendees are going to stay.

There are also three events beyond the talks, namely, the Pre-conference meting, the Kick-off party and the River Cruise.

The pre-conference meeting takes place on Sunday evening. To attend, please add it to your personal schedule so that we (and the cafe's managers) see how many of us will come there. The event is “shareware”, which means that there will be some preordered food and drinks but we kindly ask you to use our collection box there to cover expenses (about 150 UAH = 15 € per person). On top of that, you will be able to order food and drinks on your own choice. We hope that the restaurant will be able to serve 100+ people fast enough.

The kick-off party is a 90 minute event at the end of the first day with free food and drinks. This event will be served in the venue. You are free to join. It is sponsored by Booking.com.

Finally, the River Cruise is a replacement of the traditional Attendees Dinner. For our service there will be the biggest ship in Ukraine with three decks full of Perl people. The attendance is free for all the attendees with a Regular, Business or Student ticket and for the speakers giving at least one talk longer than 20 minutes. We will provide you with the walking instructions of how you can reach the river gate from the venue. Please note that the cruise starts exactly at 7 p.m. and we will not wait for those who is late. Do not try to catch some food before getting onboard, as we have a pre-ordered catering there.

We hope you will enjoin each of the activities that we prepared. We are very excited to see everybody in Kiev in a week.

Week minus 2. Limited offer for students

30/07/13 23:31 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees,

Today we are happy to announce the special limited offer for the students. If you are a student and would like to attend the main conference days, you may buy a special ticket of 20 €.

There are only 30 tickets available. The tickets are sponsored by one of our sponsors. To apply you are expected to fill in the form and later buy a ticket.

As soon as we have 30 applicants we will close the form. Please note that this ticket gives you the right to attend all the talks during the main conference days, as well as coffee breaks and lunches but it is not a ticket for the River Cruise.

We try our best to provide more opportunities for people who are interested in Perl. See you in Kiev!

Week minus 3. Make your own T-shirt

29/07/13 12:01 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees,

One of the traditional element of the YAPC::Europe conferences is a T-shirt which the attendees can get at the reception desk. This year we decided to make an experiment and let you choose your own T-shirt. You can select your personal combination of the colour and (one of the predefined) text on the T-shirt's back side.

This year's conference is entitled "Future Perl". We don't know exactly what future we will have. So, you will be able to help with understanding that and demonstrate your own vision of the future.

Please go to the conference T-shirt constructor and make your T-shirt there. Submit it until 1 August and we will print it for you and bring to the conference venue.

Make your own choice! Do not follow the crowd!

See you in Kiev very very soon.

Week minus 4. Pre-conference meeting

24/07/13 15:07 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees,

Today we are happy to inform you that we have found the place for the pre-conference meeting. Also, we are happy because it was not easy to find it :-)

The pre-conference meeting will take place on 11 August (Sunday before the main conference days) from 7 p.m. in the restaurant “Varenichnaya Katyusha” located at Volodymyrska street, 51 (please note that the street name can also be spelt Vladimirskaya, Владимирская or Володимирська).

This is a chain of the restaurants designed to show the atmosphere of the Soviet living spaces of 1960-1980's.

If you are going to join the pre-conference meeting, please add it to your personal schedule by clicking a star on the event page. This simple action from your side will help us to predict the number of people coming and thus have enough drinks and food pre-ordered.

We start at 7 p.m., the restaurant is open until midnight. Go directly to the second floor (BTW, it equals to European first floor), we've got three rooms there reserved for the meeting. Don't be late :-)

See you soon!

Week minus 5. The River Cruise menu

19/07/13 15:18 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees,

Last time we gave you some information about our conference meals. Today we are ready to publish another portion of menus, namely, the one we'll have on board during the River Cruise.

Traditionally, there is a so called Attendees Dinner happening at the end of one of the conference days. The organisers rent one of the best restaurants (often, the one offering traditional local food) and bring all the attendees there. This year we decided to use the charm of Kiev's weather in August and instead of the Attendees Dinner we will organise a River Cruise along the Dnieper River (by the way, the Dnipro Hotel where lots of attendees stay is named after this river).

We will finish the second day of the conference at 6 p.m., and will continue with the Cruise same day from 7 p.m. You will have one hour to walk down to the River station and find the gate 1 where Rosa Victoria Bateaux ship will be waiting for us. This is the biggest ship available for rent in Kiev this summer. The trip will last for four hours, from 7 till 11 p.m. After that we will return to the same gate.

There will be a buffet on board and some drinks available for free for all the attendees (and their partners, for extra price).

Buffet

Starters

• Fresh vegetable crudités with cheese sauce
• Bruschetta with salmon
• Bruschetta with salami
• Bruschetta with ham
• Ukrainian bruschetta with herring and sweet onion
• Profiteroles with air-cheese pasta
• Grissini with cheese and spices
• Mousse of smoked trout on the loaves
• Meat salad with mushrooms
• Greek salad (classic recipe)

Appetizers

• Homemade mini cabbage rolls with sour cream
• Fish quiche Red and White of the two species of fish

Hot dishes

• Escolar baked on vegetables with beer sauce
• Roasted pork loin with herb
• Sauté eggplant, zucchini and tomatoes, baked in cream sauce

Desserts

• Pancakes with cottage cheese, raisins and apple pancakes, cinnamon
• Quiche with fruit and honey
• Fruits

Drinks

• Pinot Gris Argentinian white wine
• Shiraz Argentinian red wine
• Stella Artois beer
• “Morshinskaya“ still mineral water
• “Home made“ uzvar
• “Home made“ morse
• Tea
• Coffee

Did not you buy your ticket? Do it now to enjoy this River trip with your colleagues, friends and Perl people!

Week minus 6. Catering

18/07/13 12:38 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees,

Today we are happy to announce that we will have full-fledged meals at the conference. Each day of the main conference days (Monday to Wednesday) we will offer you two coffee breaks and a lunch. We are trying to make everything to satisfy you and to minimise the need to search for food on your own :-)

The two coffee breaks take place about 11 a.m and 4:30 p.m, each 30 minutes long, while the lunch will be served from 1 to 2 p.m. Everything will be served in the venue.

We arranged the second coffee break right before the session of lightning talks so that the speakers can test their laptop connection during the break.

Here is the menu. Would you like it, go and buy your conference ticket if you did not do that yet. If you are a speaker (of at least one full-length talk) or have purchased a ticket (student, or regular, or business one), or your attendance is included in the sponsor package, you are allowed to eat :-)

Day 1

Coffee break 1

• Coffee (milk)
• Tea (lemon)
• Juices
• Sandwich with meat
• Sandwich with cheese
• Pastries (croissants and others)

Lunch

• Vegetable salad with cheese
• Meat salad
• Smoked fish with lemon
• Meat plate (4 different types of meat)
• Hot vegetable starter with mushrooms
• Salmon steak
• Chicken filet with pineapple
• Beef Goulash
• Fried Potato
• Rice
• Buckwheat
• Bread
• Juices
• Mineral Water

Coffee break 2

• Coffee (milk)
• Tea (lemon)
• Juices
• Fruit
• Chocolates

Day 2

Coffee break 1

• Coffee (milk)
• Tea (lemon)
• Juices
• Pies with various filling (meet, cheese, vegetables)
• Pastries (croissants and others)

Lunch

• Spring vegetable salad
• Salad with shrimps and vegetables
• Meat plate (4 types of meat)
• Chicken julienne in pancake
• Provance baked meat
• Chicken meat
• Beef steak
• Fried Potato
• Grilled vegetables
• Bread
• Juices
• Mineral Water

Coffee break 2

• Coffee (milk)
• Tea (lemon)
• Juices
• Fruits
• Ice cream
• Cookies with fruits and whipped cream

Day 3

Coffee break 1

• Coffee (milk)
• Tea (lemon)
• Juices
• Sandwich with cheese
• Sandwich with meat
• Pastries (croissants and others)

Lunch

• Fresh vegetables
• Chicken salad
• Salmon with butter and lemon
• Meat plate (4 types of meat)
• Mushroom julienne in pancake
• Hot grilled fish
• Pork baked with mushrooms
• Chicken Stew
• Fried Potato
• Risotto
• Bread
• Juices
• Mineral Water

Coffee break 2

• Coffee (milk)
• Tea (lemon)
• Juices
• Fruit
• Cookies

We would like to thank our sponsor, Booking.com, for covering the full cost of the above meal.

See you in Kiev!

Week minus 7. Volunteers

07/07/13 15:37 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe 2013 attendees and those who did not buy a ticket yet, :-)

Today we are pleased to introduce our volunteers. In June, a few guys from PortaOne company contacted us with their intent to help during the conference. Later same month, we received a similar request from Evozon, this time there were two ladies ready to help us with the organisational flow on site.

We are happy that this year it was so easy to find volunteers and there are so many of them (comparing to Riga in 2011 where there were much much fewer). We would like to thank them. All the people taking place in organising this year's conference are listed on the Organisers page.

What will the volunteers do? Their primary task is to help the speakers in the talk rooms, such as informing them about time left before they have to stop their talk. It is very important to keep the schedule firm, as we will have three parallel tracks and the attendees will move between the rooms. Also it will help the speakers to be more confident about how long they may speak, or should they let the audience ask questions.

A special thing with the volunteers from Evozon is that they are the part of the team who submitted a bid for hosting the YACP::Europe in 2014. The Venue Committee received three proposals: from Sofia (Bulgaria), Cluj-Napoca (Romania) and Granada (Spain). We will announce which venue was selected in the first day of the conference, on 12 August 2013. Do not miss that part of the event!

See you very soon with more news about the conference.

Week minus 8. Defining a partner

06/07/13 23:04 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees,

There're lots of things we've got to tell you about the forthcoming conference, and all the news are only good ones :-) Although we became kind of tired during the last weeks, we are still very excited about the result we would like to achieve.

There were a few questions about attending the Partners Programme and it looks like we have to be more clear about who the partner is and what they can use for free.

It is easy. There are basically two things that we offer to your partner.

First, if they come with you and stay in Kiev during the conference day, they may use our free Partners Programme excursions, which will take place each day in approximately the same time when you will be in the venue listening to the talks. Once again, this is completely free. It's worth to notify us by sending an e-mail to mail@yapcrussia.org.

Second, there will be a River Cruise at the end of the second conference day, and you are welcome to attend it with the partner. Contrary to the Partners Programme, this is not free of charge. As an attendee or a speaker, you may attend the Cruise yourself with no additional cost. For your partner you have to buy an additional River Cruise ticket. The option is available on the purchase page of the conference site. In this case there's no need to inform us, because we will see your payment. Neither you have to register your partner on the site.

We hope we made it clear of what, where and how your partners may participate.

There were also questions about children. For sure, we are welcome to see our attendees with their children in Kiev but we cannot provide any child day care for them. If your partner believes they will manage to attend the Partners Programme or the River Cruise with a child, feel free to join!

See you soon with more newsletters (and actually more correct week countdown number).

Week minus 9. Talks, speakers and time

12/06/13 20:05 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees,

The week countdown counter just turned to become a one digit value. It is only nine weeks left before the conference! Are you ready?

Today we talk about talks :-)

If you are going to give a talk at the conference (and thus get a free ticket) and still did not submit it consider doing that now: act.yapc.eu/ye2013/newtalk.

The deadline for talk submissions is 1 July (it is less than a month from today). We will notify all the speakers of whether their talks are accepted or not before 15 July. The final schedule will be ready on 1 August.

There are a few more news connected with the topic of this newsletter.

First of all, our Programming Committee is already working and you may consult it at any moment by e-mailing to talks@yapcrussia.org. Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any doubts about your talk, its title, theme, duration or whatever you might want to ask. You are also welcome to send us your slides if you want to ask us about its content or layout.

Secondly, we are glad to introduce you our four volunteers from PortaOne who will work in the talk rooms to help the speakers to agree with the conference schedule. You can find their faces on the conference site.

By the way, this time we will make the schedule in such a way that there are at least 10 minute gaps between adjacent talks. This decision is based on the feedback you gave us in Riga a couple of years ago.

Excited? We too. Come to Kiev!

Week minus 10. The Perl 6 hackathon

12/06/13 09:39 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees,

We can now confirm the Perl 6 hackathon and announce its details. This event will take place one day before the main conference days, namely, on 11 August (Sunday) from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The hackathon's venue will be the Byzantium Hall, located on the second floor of the Dnipro hotel.

To participate in the hackathon please add it to your personal schedule so that we can see how many people to expect. We will provide the attendees with two coffee breaks. This event is free of charge.

The Dnipro hotel stands across the square in front of the conference venue, and according to our wiki page Who Stays Where is the most popular hotel among the attendees (don't miss the opportunity to book a room there with a conference discount).

Take the chance to speed up the Perl 6 development!

Weeks minus 13 to minus 11. Keep going

29/05/13 10:59 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees,

Here we are again. This year we've started the preparation so early that now there are not too many things that we have to worry about.

So far, we've got the contract with the venue and the boat rent agreement. We shaped the Partner Programme. We've settled the details of Larry Wall's attendance and are now working with the speakers to have better talks on the conference. Now we are negotiating some minor details with a few more sponsors, and are in the process of compiling the menu for daily coffee breaks and lunches, as well as the buffet for the River Cruise.

Last weekend Andrew attended the Polish Perl workshop in Warsaw for promoting the conference. The organisers managed to make a great event with lots of foreign attendees, and all the talks were given in English. One of the attendees won a free ticket to the YAPC::Europe 2013.

If you are going to attend the Perl 6 hackathon on 12 August in Kiev, be sure to prepare yourself and watch the latest Perl 6 video, a talk about moving Perl 6 to the Java virtual machine given by Jonathan Worthington in Warsaw last Saturday.

That's all for today. See you soon.

Weeks minus 15 and 14. Lurking in the hidden schedule

08/05/13 21:49 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees,

The beginning of May was a silent period as there were a number of holidays in a number of countries :-) and the activity of the sites users was also low. Anyway, today the conference statistics made a record and hit 100 committed attendees. Committed are those who bought a ticket or whose talk was accepted.

As of today, there are 243 registered people coming from 27 countries and 47 monger groups, and 101 committed users. We are looking forward to bigger numbers, which only make the conference better, as the YAPC is not only a set of technical talks but also a socialising and communication event. The conference in Europe is one of the few real chances to meed your online Perl pals (would it be IRC, or PM mailing lists, or sites like blogs.perl.org) and make new friends.

To help you decide we will give a small extraction from behind the scene. Take a look at the talks that are submitted to us but are not yet approved. The official schedule publication date is 1 August. We will try to approve the best talks from as many speakers as possible. Some of them submitted more than one talk, which we appreciate very much. Would you like to participate, simply submit your talk now.

We've change the configuration of the site so that you can see all the talks submitted, weather they are accepted or not.

The list of talks is available onine

So, we wish you a pleasant reading. Don't forget that some talks are already accepted and are also visible in the schedule. See you next week!

Week minus 16. Spread the word

25/04/13 12:11 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe 2013 attendees,

Less and less time remains before the conference. It is getting closer and closers.

There are about 100 committed attendees so far, that is the attendees who either speak at the conference or bought a ticket. There are 27 countries in the list there. The first attendee from India appeared there last week.

Did you tell your friends and colleagues about the forthcoming conference. We are doing that here and there :-)

Last Thursday our friend Pavel Vlasov gave a small intro to the the conference at the NY.pm Emergency Social meeting.

Also, last Friday Andrew and Anatoly from the organisers team attended the Dutch Perl Workshop in Arnhem.

Would you like to spread the word? You can use these slides to do that.

Week minus 17. Checklists

17/04/13 11:47 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees,

This week's newsletter contains a few useful checklists. Please follow them to make your attendance easier and more pleasant.

If you are a speaker,

• Submit a talk proposal as early as you can
• Talk submission deadline is 1 July
• Prepare your slides
• Have got a question? Ask us: mail@yapcrussia.org
• Wait until your talk is accepted (not later than 15 July)
• See you talk in the schedule on 1 August or even earlier
• Do not buy a ticket if the talk is accepted
• Check if the date and time are convenient for you

If you are an attendee or a speaker,

• Check the conference's agenda
• See the venue details and address
• Check where who stays
• Find and book a hotel with the best prices and discounts
• Update your travel details on a wiki

If you do not speak,

• Buy a conference ticket
• Tell a friend about the conference

If you are coming with a partner,

• Buy additional ticket to the river cruise
• Register for the Partners Programme

Thank you!

See you next week.

Week minus 18. Partners Programme

07/04/13 23:13 by Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi (‎vti‎)

YAPC::Europe 2013 Partners Programme

Today we are announcing the Partners Progamme for the YAPC::Europe 2013 conference in Kiev. We've been talking about it before but finally we've got a rough schedule and are awaiting for your feedback.

The Partner Programme is for everyone travelling together with a conference attendee and not very insterested in attending the event. Instead of sitting at the hotel or walking along the city alone one has a wonderful opportunity to join the company of other guests and enjoy Kiev with our experienced guide.

Our guide is our friend Oksana Tsupko, a certified ukrainian tour guide. You can visit her website for more information. Quoting her:

...the most desirable thing for the most of tourists is to feel and see real life and spirit of a country, but not only to watch "must see places" with endless group excursions... One of my prior tasks is to create sincere friendly atmosphere in relations with my tourist guests. And from this friendship our great trip begins!...

The Programme itself is free, you pay for your the transportation, tickets and food.

We've prepared the first draft of the schedule:

Monday, 12 August

10:00 — Meeting at the Ukrainian House

10:00-14:00 — Walking tour "Ancient Kiev"

14:00-15:00 — Lunch

15:00-16:00 — Chernobyl museum or walking trip along Dnieper shore and Pedestrian bridge

17:00-18:00 — Walking tour through the Podil region

Tickets: St.Sophia Cathedral ~6€, Chernobyl museum ~2€.

Tuesday, 13 August

10:00 — Meeting at the Ukrainian House

10:00-12:00 — Walking tour in Pecherskiy region

12:00-14:00 — Trip to Kiev-Pechersk Lavra Monastery

14:00-15:00 — Lunch

15:00-17:00 — War museum and Motherland or Hydropark and Obolon quay

Tickets: Kiev-Pechersk Lavra Monastery ~5€, War Museum ~1€.

Wednesday, 14 August

12:00 — Meeting at the Ukrainian House

12:00-15:00 — Bus trip to Pirogovo Open Air museum (Lunch at the museum)

15:00-16:30 — Pinchuck Contemporary Art Center or Water Museum

16:30-17:00 — Walking tour along Kreschatic

Tickets: Pirogovo Open Air museum ~3€, Pinchuck Contemporary Art Center free, Water Museum ~5€.

If you're going to attend the Partners Programme, please, register yourself by sending an email to mail@yapcrussia.org.

Let us know if you have ideas and like to see something else!

Do not forget to buy a ticket for the conference and book a hotel at the lowest price.

Week minus 19. Viewing the venue. Slide formats

01/04/13 00:01 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe 2013 attendees,

First of all, the Early bird price expired. The good news though is that only today you can buy a ticket using our Late bird special offer for only 100 €.

It looks like spring finally comes to Europe, so let us take a look at today's Kiev and see how to get to the venue from its central square. We hope you enjoy the city and already is looking forward to see it in August.

Slide formats

Let us also say a few words about the format of the presentation slides we expect the speakers to follow.

Generally, all the speakers come with their own laptop and we connect it to the projector in the talk room using a standard VGA connector. We kindly ask you to check if your laptop supports it. Please also test how it works when you connect external monitor. Sometimes the speakers spend time to find the right checkbox in their operation system settings only to share video on the second monitor. We will help you in the venue during the conference if we can.

We expect the slides to be in any format that works fine on your system and you are comfortable with. Would it be PowerPoint, or Apple Keynote, or Takahashi. You may prepare the slides to be displayed at 1024x768 pixels. Please try to make the slides contrast and avoid red colour on a dark background as it tends to escape from a projection.

Would you prefer to leave your laptop at home, please send us your presentation before the conference so that we know you will need a laptop during your talk.

Talks in the Main room

For those of you who are lucky to speak in the main room, we ask you to prepare your slides on a 35 mm film. It may be coloured or black and white. Main venue's equipment allows to use sound track along with the slides.

Please make sure you leave enough time for the questions. For example, if your talk is 20 minute long, try to stop at least after 15 minutes to allow a few minutes for the audience. You may prepare additional bonus slide though.

The frame has to have an aspect ratio of 1.37:1, with its size of 22 mm by 16 mm (so called Academy format). As an exception we will accept the slides in widescreen format (1.85:1). Please let us know about this before the talk as we will have to adjust the curtains on the stage.

New media partner

We are also happy to announce our new media partner, who will be able to help with developing films with your slides. Welcome Peer Vision Ltd.

You may leave your film at one of the Peer Vision's office in Europe. They will process them and bring to Kiev for your.

Finland Yksisuuntainen katu, 92 FI-00101 Helsinki Germany 3. Einbahnstraße, 14 10249 Berlin Spain Una calle de Sentido, 75 28311 Madrid

Questions?

Please do not hesitate to contact us at mail@yapcrussia.org if you have any questions about your talk. We are happy to help you and we really want to make this year's conference successful.

See you next week with more details about the YAPC::Europe 2013 in Kiev.

Week minus 20. The principles behind the schedule

29/03/13 00:03 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe 2013 attendees,

Let us share some basic information about how we will be compiling the schedule for the conference.

During the main conference days, namely, Monday 12^th through Wednesday 14^th August there will be three talk threads every day. One of the tracks will go in the big room where all the attendees can gather at the same time. This is the biggest room in the venue with almost 500 seats in it.

Every day will be opened at 10 o'clock in the main room. First come some hot news about the conference and its flow, then a keynote from one of our best speakers.

After that we continue with three parallel tracks and do it until about 5 o'clock in the evening, when a session of lightning talks starts. There will be three sessions, one hour each, all in the main room. You may submit a lightning talk now.

There will be a number of 30 second slots between lightning talks so that you have a chance to make your small announcements.

During the day there will be two 30-minute coffee breaks and one-hour lunch. Catering will be organised in the venue, so that you will not be lost in the city trying to find a place to have meal at.

Based on the feedback you gave us in Riga in 2011, we will make the pauses between the talks 10 minute long. This will allow you to find the room without any rush. Should you have time to choose the next talk you attend, you'll have a few additional minutes to do that.

The talks itself will all start and finish at the same time, so people will not interrupt any ongoing talks if they want to join after another talk ends. This does not apply to longer talks though, like the ones with tutorials or mini master classes, which can be up to one hour long.

If you have any comments and wishes about the flow of the conference, please do not hesitate to send them to us at mail@yapcrussia.org. Please do it before the conference, not after it :-)

Let us also remind you that we are waiting for more submitted talks. Please add your talk online as soon as possible.

Also remember that the Early bird price expires in a couple of days. Do not wait, buy your conference ticket now.

In the next newsletter we will show you a bit of the venue and will publish the guidelines for the slides that we expect the speakers to follow.

See you really soon!

Week minus 21. Coffee breaks and lunches

21/03/13 01:00 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe 2013 attendees,

Let us deliver a portion of really good news. We were working hard the last few months to be able to announce it today.

Every day, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, there will be two coffee breaks and a lunch, and they all will be served at the venue.

Although we are not gathering in Kiev just to eat together, we think it is very important to have high quality catering at the event. There will be no need to go outside of the venue and look for cafes or restaurants. This will also let us keep the lunch break one hour long, giving more time for the talks.

You will be able to eat and talk with your colleagues from other cities and countries, all in the regular conference hours.

Let's then just keep today's newsletter this short :-) There will be more news about when and where you can eat and drink at the conference in the following weeks (we've got more good news to come).

Week minus 22. Call for venue 2014

13/03/13 13:51 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees and Perl lovers,

A brief statistics update first. At the moment there are 155 registered people coming from 22 countries and 36 monger groups. You may explore and see who is coming online.

Also, don't forget that the Early Bird ticket price is expiring in a couple of weeks. Buy now.

Talks submission is also still open. We encourage the speakers to submit talks as early as possible, as it will help us to compile and unveil the schedule earlier. Which, in turn, will attract new attendees and let us make the better conference.

Anyway, last week the YAPC::Europe Venue Committee has announced a Call for Venue. In other words, local groups of European Perl users are expected to apply for hosting the YAPC::Europe in 2014.

Let us take another small look at the backstage behind the conference organisation. The call for venue from the Committee means that it's time to think about the place where the next year's YAPC::Europe will take place. It can be one of the city where there was one of the previous conference, or a completely new one. For those willing to host a YAPC in their town it is a very exciting time. Believe us, we had experienced that four times :-)

The process of choosing the next venue is long enough, although it is almost not visible to the regular attendees. The groups of local Perl mongers submit a proposal, which includes a lot of details about the place they propose. Airports, hotels, public transport, visas, beer prices, restaurants, city infrastructure, Perl activities in the area, catering, additional activities, sponsors, financial things, — all that must be described in detail in the proposal. After receiving a proposal the Venue Committee prepares a big list of questions to the potential organisers, and then finally votes. The YAPC::Europe Foundation Board then approves the choice.

The next venue will be announced during the opening of this year's YAPC::Europe. In the closing session, the future organisers will tell you about their city and their ideas about the next conference (would you add this talk to your personal schedule on the site, the next organisers will be able to see your interest in their conference).

So, you see, in practice the organisers spend more than a year to prepare the three day conference. This year we are demonstrating the process of the preparation in our weekly-live-show newsletters. There's a full archive of them online.

Just a curious fact. Assuming about 300 attendees at the conference and a year of preparations, there will be more that one full day of organisers' attention for each attendee :-)

We are very excited to see you all in Kiev in August.

Week minus 23. A brief update

03/03/13 21:18 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear attendees,

There are a few small and big things that we did last week for the conference. Let us tell you about them.

First of all, we signed a contract with the river cruise boat and are thinking now of the best possible route so that we can both see the incredible Kiev landscape from water and have enough time for the social part on board. Also, we are working on the buffet menu. All in all, the cruise is going to be an amazing conference experience. Just take a look at their official video.

Let us also remind that less than a month is left until the Early Bird price expires. If you buy a ticket today, you can save 18% of its price. This is only possible before 1 April.

Also don't forget that the number of available rooms in the hotels around the venue can only decrease. Find and book your hotel free of charge. There's also a wiki page "Who stays where" where you can left a note of where you are going to stay so that other attendees can choose a hotel where more (or fewer) Perl people will be staying during the conference.

And now the most important thing. We have asked three persons, all well known in the Perl community, Dmitry Karasik, Alex Kapranov and Ruslan Zakirov, to join us to work in the Programming Committee. So, we have enough eyes and brains now to compile a good schedule with as few thematic clashes as possible. In other words, it is the right moment to submit your talk to the conference. Don't have a talk ready? Submit a proposal and follow the CDD (conference driven development) technique to finish the slides :-)

The title of this year's conference is "Future Perl". We would like to think together about the future of our beloved programming language, about what it will become in the following years, and what is the roadmap.

There are already a couple of talks scheduled for the first day of the conference, not counting Larry Wall's keynote.

Dave Cross. 25 Years of Perl in (about) 25 Minutes‎.

Richard Jelinek. ‎HowTo: Perl as the most popular scripting language‎.

That's all for today, see you next week. Would you like to contact us, do not hesitate to send an e-mail to mail@yapcrussia.org.

Week minus 24. Booking a hotel and discounts

28/02/13 00:31 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe 2013 attendees and those who is still considering joining (don't wait, join now),

This week we're publishing our regular weekly newsletter on Wednesday instead of a usual Sunday (ok, even Wednesday evening :-). Guess why? We have done a lot of work during the last few days. Preparing a great conference is a very exciting thing by itself, maybe even more interesting than debating about the Perl versioning and naming :-) Not only we try to make the attendees happier but we also would be proud to establish new standards for hosting future conferences.

Anyway, our main news today is: we launched the Hotel reservation service on our site.

What is it? It is a page where you can see all the hotels that are available in Kiev, and find them on the map so that you can easily understand how far from the venue the hotel is. The venue, of course, is also marked on the map.

There's a list of about 200 hotels, hostels, aparthotels and apartments that are waiting for your reservation. For a quick reference of price levels you can select the dates you are going to stay in Kiev and the number of people in the room. Click "Search hotels" button and get the real time prices immediately.

Explore the hotels either by scrolling the list on the left or by clicking the hotel markers on the map. For each hotel we display (apart from their names and addresses) the minimal available price for the whole stay period and the distance from the venue.

The venue we selected for the conference is located in the very centre of the city, so there are plenty of hotels nearby, and you don't need to use any public transport if you book a room in one of them.

This is not the end of the story. We are pretty much sure that the prices you find on our accommodation search service are the lowest available on the internet - would it be a hotel site or an online travel agency.

Even more, for the majority of the hotels in Kiev you even don't need to pay upfront. Just reserve a room (credit card will still be needed for confirming your booking) and pay at the hotel on arrival!

All done? No! There are a few hotels for which you as an attendee can get a discount. Those are marked with a red label in the bubble on the map. The link will lead you to a page where you can choose your personal discount. It can either be a 5% discount or a fixed discount of approx. 25 euro for the whole stay.

Explore the hotels by clicking on "Learn more and Book now". You will go to our partner's site ostrovok.ru, where you will see available rooms, photos and detailed descriptions of the selected hotel.

Would you like to book it, do it on ostrovok.ru. Even if you are not yet 100% sure you attend the conference, you may safely find and select a hotel which is refundable, i.e. often there's no cancellation fee if you cancel early enough (please read the hotel policy on the site for more information on that).

This searching service is available in two languages, English and Russian (booking and payment are also available in both of them).

Just a few extra notes about all this.

We do not take any extra money from the attendees who book rooms using the service. All we raise there is an affiliate commission that we are going to add to the conference budget.

All the prices should be really lower that anywhere else. Should you find cheaper price for the same room, let us know.

So, booking a hotel you not only receive a better price but also support the conference paying no extra money! Book it: act.yapc.eu/ye2013/accommodation/index.html.

If you'd like to learn more about the service behind hotel reservation we work with, please refer ostrovok.ru/about/en/. Also take into account that at least 50% of the organisers team already used the service themselves.

Next week we will tell more about what we are working on to make the conference the best ever YAPC::Europe.

Week minus 25. Ceasefire

17/02/13 12:40 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe 2013 attendees,

First of all, let us thank you for commenting our previous newsletter so actively. This was a nice test for the commenting system we added recently to the site. It also gave us all an opportunity to let the steam off so that more productive discussions and talks appear in the conference. Thank you for your feedback.

Just a reminder: we are inviting everybody who is interested in Perl 6 development to attend the Perl 6 hackathon that will take place on the day before the conference, on Sunday 11 August. Also, we would still like to find a person who will take a responsibility to lead the Perl 5 hackathon and organise an attractive event for those who are interested in the Perl 5 internals.

Perl is a language with 25 years of its history and it is still active and there are a lot of people to whom it is very important to move the language further. We clearly see that in the numerous discussions of the recent days. We only encourage everybody to be polite and respect each other's opinion.

Last week

During the last week we, the organisers of this year's conference, were working with sponsors to be able to make the conference better. We also contacted Larry Wall for the comments on the names and versions.

Perl 7 was one of the bright proposals in the recent discussions and it became a topic of our last week's newsletter. Here is what Larry thinks about this name:

Perl 7 is a complete non-solution. If people have a hard time understanding the relationship of Perl 5 and Perl 6, how can you expect that they would ever understand the relationship of Perl 6 and Perl 7. :)

Another noticeable proposal was made by Matt S. Trout (mst), who suggested to divide the Perl 5 and 6 by renaming the version 5 to Pumpkin Perl. This may help to make a clear distinction between the Perl 6 language, which became a separate language in the Perl language family, and the language now know as Perl 5.

Let us quote Matt here but please follow his posts if you want to learn more.

I want to add a qualifier to the name of perl5 to make it clear that it has its own identity independent of the perl6 project.

I propose as that qualifier 'Pumpkin' since this is the perl release managed by the pumpking, the holder of the patch pumpkin.

We also asked Larry about the Pumpkin Perl and here is his response:

"Pumpkin Perl" doesn't bother me at all, especially since mst asked me if it was okay before he proposed it. :)

He then continues:

However, I think this is all somewhat beside the point. Perl 6 is designed to fix the problems pointed out by the 361 RFCs, and Perl 5, by whatever name, needs to address at least a subset of the same problems, and that is not likely to be easy to get consensus on. Also, I suspect that as soon as Perl 6 achieves speed parity and interoperability with Perl 5, there will be less grumbling all around, since a part of that is driven by a perception of the failure of Perl 6. But when Perl 6 actually does become a better Perl 5, people won't fight it quite so much. That's how it looks from this end, anyway... :)

Keep calm

Let us continue this issue with one more quote. Neil Bowers left a nice comment in one of the discussions about all that stuff.

The biggest problem facing Perl is the lack of a single clear vision for where Perl is going, and a strategy for getting there. And there's no-one (wanting) to provide these things. And the lack of this prompts some people to pitch their vision and strategy (which is where I think Moe is coming from). I briefly hoped that one of the outputs of the perl reunification summit was going to be such a vision, but if it was I didn't see it.

I'd prefer a single unified vision, as I think the greatest success for Perl lies that way.

This is exactly what we as the organises want. We want Perl to be a successful programming language. At least for the next year, until the next YAPC::Europe conference, and pass this hard task to the following organisers :-) We just encourage everybody not to insult each other within a Perl community, to hear each other and not to be too serious when it is easier just to laugh at a problem and go on.

T-shirts

This year the conference is entitled Future Perl. Nobody knows the future but most of us want it to happen in their own way. We don't want any fights and battles. We sure that the bottom line of everybody's opinion is Perl's success.

So, it looks like a wise idea not to wear a uniform this time. We published a prototype of what we are going to propose. The Attendees will be able to choose their own version of the conference T-shirt. Nobody will be offended. You may preview the T-shirt constructor online at act.yapc.eu/ye2013/t-shirt/index.html.

Remember that at the moment there is no budget available for printing the T-shirts, thus to make that possible we need more sponsors and there's no need to fight against the T-shirt design :-)

Carry on

All in all, we are very happy that we have the change to at least stay nearby while such a historical changes happen. Come to the conference so that you can tell the story to your children and grandchildren. We can treat the whole story as another round of collecting RFCs for our future Perl.

In the next newsletter we will return to the things related to the organisational process itself and will talk about accommodation in Kiev and getting the best price for the hotels.

Week minus 26. Perl 7

11/02/13 12:15 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe 2013 attendees,

The number of people registered on the conference site went over 100 recently. So, since this week, we will deliver our weekly newsletters to your mailboxes. There's also a permanent place where you can catch up with the latest news about the conference. At act.yapc.eu/ye2013/news/ we are collecting all the previous newsletters.

Just a reminder that everything has been open: user registration, online payment gate and talk submission form. Just explore the site and act: yapc.eu/2013.

Today we would spend some time talking about Perl 7. Probably there's no one here who did not see at least a small portion of the discussion that burst a week ago on blogs.perl.org and nntp.perl.org. There were a number of posts about, well, yes, Perl 7. The title of this year's conference is Future Perl, so we as the organisers are very excited about the chance to move Perl forward exploiting the conference.

As a disclaimer, please note that we are not going to restrict the topics of the talks in any way and encourage the users and maintainers of Perl 5, the developers of Perl 6, and the thinkers of Perl 7 to attend the conference, communicate with other attendees and give talks about Perl of any version.

This season's discussions about Perl 7 started presumably with the Curtis Ovid Poe's short post on blogs.perl.org where he asked what the community thought about the change of the major version of Perl to 7 instead of releasing the version numbered 5.20. You may find lots of arguments in the comments to that post and in all other posts written by different authors that appeared later in different places.

Summarising the arguments, the reasons to ship Perl 7 are the following:

• There were no major version change for ages.
• The version 5 seems old-fashined, if not ancient (at least if you look only at the years of the releases).
• The differences among the subversions (5.6, 5.8, 5.10 and higher) are only known to the narrow group of Perl users but not beyond it.
• Perl 6 is perhaps not well known as a research project and people tend to think that if Perl 6 is the next major version of Perl and it is still under development, Perl itself is not developing.

The reasons not to call Perl Perl 7 now are:

• We'd better fix more bugs in existent internal code of Perl.
• We need to add more default features and remove the outdated ones first.
• It's better just to write cool applications to show the power of Perl.
• By simply changing of the major version we will attract enormous attention and will disappoint people when they will explore what's really new appeared in Perl 7.

So what as an organisers can we do to support Perl development? Among the T-shirts :-)

We already will offer a place for hacking on Perl 6. Before the conference there will be a whole-day Perl 6 hackathon. We invite there everybody who is interested not only in Rakudo implementation but also who is interested in what's going on inside the language and its specification, which had so much influenced the current Perl 5 and added a number of nice features (starting from say) that really gave Perl 5 another life forces after the release of Perl 5.10.

Really, Perl has changed a lot since then, and maybe we needed to call it Perl 7 instead of Perl 5.10, not 5.20? But why not do it now? We don't have to be afraid of the fact that there are not too many differences between Perl 5.18 and Perl 5.20, or that there will be some boilerplates (like the need to explicitly use utf8) that would be nice to leave in the past.

These concerns are all correct but let's not lose more time and turn the Perl 7 project into a 15 years of development, trying to agree on thousands of tiny details. We have to move further. It's just so attractive and exciting.

As a small example showing that it's not late to move to another maximum on the curve of Perl's popularity, watch the brilliant talk The Perl Renaissance given this year by Paul Fenwick at linux.conf.au 2013, the Australia's Linux and Open Source conference.

Direct link to the video

The things mentioned in the talk all sound like the ones from a modern language, so, why not make it modern from the first look and become it evident for everybody? Don't forget that three years ago, in 2010, there was a YAPC::Europe in Pisa entitled The Renaissance of Perl. Once again, what we thought of as new in Perl 5.10 a few years ago and what we've made with Perl to make it Modern is still attractive enough to bring new Perl users today. We just have to act ourselves.

Another proof of how fast and active Perl users can be was demonstrated at FOSDEM this year. At first, the Perl dev room proposal was rejected by the organisers. In a week(!) before the conference the dev room was finally accepted and the Perl community managed to gather the whole-day track of Perl talks just in a few days. And there were more talks ready to fill another day.

Now back to our Perl conference in Kiev. We added a talk, Perl 7 Round Table, and encourage you to star it if you are interested in discussing the change of the major version of Perl. We want to invite active Perl users on stage to argue about pros and contras, and to answer the conference attendees questions. We also would like to schedule it close to the Larry Wall's keynote and would like to know his opinion on the subject.

You may already start a discussion by commenting this newsletter at the conference site.

Week minus 27. Current progress

02/02/13 20:21 by Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi (‎vti‎)

Time definitely flies. We're almost the half way towards our journey's destination -- YAPC::Europe 2013 in Kiev. Here is a quick wrap-up of the current progress and the future plans.

Venue and dates

In December we've signed up a venue contract and settled the dates: 12-14 August of 2013.

Infrustructure

We've set up and opened the website http://yapc.eu/2013. We try to keep it nice looking and updated.

Announcements

We've been announcing the conference at every conference/workshop we've been to: OSDN, Provectus IT. Expert Day: Modern Perl, Saint Perl, FOSDEM and almost every Kiev.pm meeting :)

Media

Slowly but surely we are starting the campaign of announcing the conference through various websites and media interested in open source and programming in general, without limiting us only to the Perl resources. If you want to help promoting the conference, let us know!

Guest Speakers

We're contacting several Perl hackers and negotiating their visits to Kiev.

River Cruise

We've found the big enough ship for the attendees and working towards signing the contract with the cruise company. This is going to be fun!

Partners Programme

Yes, we are doing this. This means you don't have to leave your partner at home, bring them to Kiev too!

Sponsors

We've contacted over 40 companies and individuals who could be interested in sponsoring a Perl event. So far we've received a little bit more than 20 answers, 9 of them were positive. If you or your company got an email from us, please, tell us something! No is still a good answer :)

A big THANK YOU to everyone who is helping us making this conference possible. If you want to support Perl and its community, please join the club!

Current Statistics

We have over 90 registered members and 5 sponsors so far. Thank you all!

Early Bird and Send-a-Newbie programme

Save yourself some euros by buying a ticket before the 1st of April. And if you still cannot afford the ticket, take a look at the Send-a-Newbie programme and see if you can apply.

Future

More attendees, more media, more sponsors and more awesomeness!

Week minus 28. Lightning talks

29/01/13 14:59 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees and those who is still considering attending it,

First of all, let me inform you that we are looking for volunteers who will lead the Partner programme. I hope that in a few weeks we will be able to announce the programme or its absence.

Then, a couple of days ago, R Geoffrey Avery, YAPC's permanent Lightning Talks organiser, opened submissions of lightning talks. There will be three lightning talk sessions, one at the end of each conference day. The three sessions of 60 minutes will include ten five-minute talks and short announces in-between.

To submit a lightning talk, please use our online submission form.

If you'd like to know more about what lightning talks are, please read the detailed description available on the site.

Just to list a few ideas for talks of that kind, here's a quote:

1. Why my favorite module is X.
2. I want to do cool project X. Does anyone want to help?
3. Successful Project: I did project X. It was a success. Here's how you could benefit.
4. Failed Project: I did project X. It was a failure, and here's why.
5. Heresy: People always say X, but they're wrong. Here's why.
6. You All Suck: Here's what is wrong with the our community.
7. Call to Action: Let's all do more of X / less of X.
8. Wouldn't it be cool if X?
9. Someone needs to do X.
10. Wish List.
11. Why X was a mistake.
12. Why X looks like a mistake, but isn't.
13. What it's like to do X.
14. Here's a useful technique that worked.
15. Here's a technique I thought would be useful but didn't work.
16. Why algorithm X sucks.
17. Comparison of algorithms X and Y.

And now you may watch the recording of the first day of Lightning talks session from YAPC::Europe 2011 in Riga.

Week minus 29. Call for speakers

22/01/13 01:27 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Hi,

To make a great conference, we need great talks. Today I'd like to encourage everybody to submit a talk to YAPC::Europe 2013. It's easy, just fill in a form on the conference site: act.yapc.eu/ye2013/newtalk.

This year there will be three parallel talk tracks. We plan to start at 10 a.m. with a keynote (single-threaded) and finish at 6 p.m. with a lightning talk session (also single-threaded). The time in-between will be filled with talks, food and communication :-)

We offer four possible length of the talks: 20, 40, 60 and 120 minutes.

20 minutes are intended for introductory talks, where the speakers gives some basic information about the topic and assumes that the listeners would like to get an idea of a new technology, or some new usage pattern, or new ideas in some area.

40 minutes are for general purpose talks, and the speakers are expected to talk about a particular topic in detail.

60 minute talks are reserved for keynotes and in-depth talks. There are only a limited number of keynote slots and we expect to have well known speakers there.

In-depth talks are a kind of teaching class but shorter. The attendees coming to an in-depth talks should have strong intent to develop particular knowledge of technology. In exceptional cases we might allow 120 minutes for the talk of this kind.

On top of that we're planning to have three one-hour sessions of five-minute lightning talks. You may submit them using the same form.

While submitting a talk please specify as many details as you can, including the level of intended audience and tag list (so that the attendees can easily filter talks on the site). Would you like to leave comments for the organisers, there is a separate field there for you.

Talk submissions deadline is 1 July. Speaker notification date is 15 July. Final (well, close to final) schedule is expected to be published on 1 August.

In addition to the official dates above we will try to accept talks earlier if it will be obvious that the talk should appear in the schedule, and there's no need to wait any formal date.

I should also mention that all the accepted speakers (except those who give only lightning talk) attend the conference free of charge.

So, take the chance to attend the YAPC::Europe in Kiev for free and submit your talk now!

Week minus 30. Call for sponsors

14/01/13 21:47 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Hello,

After a week of Christmas (the Eastern one) break we are here to continue our weekly newsletters. They will now also appear on the conference site in the News section.

First, a brief statistics update. Today there are 71 registered people coming from 15 countries and 26 monger groups. There are four submitted talks already. And we have some first early bird ticket purchasers. Thanks to all of them.

Today we would like to call for sponsorship.

YAPC::Europe is a non-profit event aimed for those who use Perl in their daily activity (or even on a monthly or yearly basis, checking the crontab settings after migrating to a new server :-) All income comes from attendee fees and from sponsors.

The attendee fee is extremely low comparing to other IT conferences. I would even make the attendance free if we would have enough external support. Everything we get we spend on the venue, equipment, food and other activities such as renting the rooms for hackathons, the river cruise this year (instead of the attendees dinner). Also we cover expenses of a few guest speakers (the list of them is really very small, and believe me nobody of them gets luxury rooms :-) There are some occasional expenses like printing souvenirs (if ever), posters etc.

We are inviting companies that use Perl and would like to support its development to sponsor the YAPC::Europe 2013 in Kiev. Sponsoring YAPC not only allows make it cheap for the attendees but also provides a great way to support language development, ideas exchange and visibility in the outer world.

Companies sponsoring the conference get their brand well known among the attendees. Every year the European branch of YAPC collects 300-400 people including programmers, system administrators, freelancers, IT managers and even web designers.

Perl world comes hand to hand with the global Open source movement, thus being with us will make your company more open in the eyes of the attendees.

Finally, there are recruitment opportunities during the conference. Having a booth in the venue will give you three days of the conference attendance, and everybody coming there will not be able to miss your booth. Recruiters from the previous years were able to find new employees there. Would you like to interview your candidates during the conference, we will let you do that in the venue (in Riga there were a special room behind the scene).

We offer four sponsorship levels with different set of options.

• Platinum Sponsors
• Gold Sponsors
• Silver Sponsors
• Sponsors

There is also a Corporate attendee price for business users.

The detailed description of the above mentioned sponsorship levels is available on the conference site at the special page. Please note that we are very open to discuss the details to find the best terms for everybody.

Please contact us at mail@yapcrussia.org for further details.

Support Perl today to ensure your future!

Thank you.

Week minus 32. First results

30/12/12 17:19 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear readers,

This Sunday post is the last one before the new 2013 year begins. So, a beautiful chance to have an opportunity to list some results that we achieved during the year and share some plans for the next one.

This year we made a big and very brave step towards hosting YAPC::Europe in Kiev. We made a proposal to the YAPC::Europe Venue Committee after the announcement that there were no other groups to host the conference in 2013. On the one side, we had an experience with making smaller events in Kiev and the YAPC in Riga in recent years, on the other, we have failed with our proposal to host the conference in Kiev in 2010. I knew that it would be difficult to find a suitable and big enough venue in the city but two guys, Yaroslav Korshak and Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi made a beautiful explorations of the places in Kiev where that was possible. We have selected the Ukrainian House, the building that I was looking at for a few years, even not thinking that it was possible to talk to its owners :-)

Last week we signed a contract with the venue and thus we officially announced in our Twitter post that the dates of the conference are now fixed. The YAPC::Europe 2013 in Kiev will be held on 12-14 August 2013.

Before the end of the year we managed to launched the conference site with a canonical address: yapc.eu/2013. (The URL unification is also a nice trend that other conference organisers follow for a couple of years).

Since the launch of the site a week ago, there are already 55 registered users from 13 different countries and 19 monger groups (well, with some non-geographical exceptions).

Ukraine	19
Russia	16
Netherlands	4
United Kingdom	4
France	2
Germany	2
Denmark	2
Cyprus	1
Spain	1
Poland	1
Belarus	1
United States	1
Austria	1

Kiev.pm	8
Moscow.pm	8
London.pm	3
drinkers.pm	2
Amsterdam.pm	2
Copenhagen.pm	2
Vienna.pm	1
Spb.pm	1
Erlangen.pm	1
Bristol.pm	1
Kazan.pm	1
Minsk.pm	1
Bicycle.pm	1
Frankfurt.pm	1
Paris.pm	1
Warsaw.pm	1
Sophia.pm	1
northwestengland.pm	1
Barcelona.pm	1

This is a fantastic result for the first week after site launch, especially regarding the fact that we did not announce the final dates when we launched it.

We also are happy that there is the first sponsor of the conference: the Third Lane Technologies company. We encourage all the companies who use Perl as their main tool or just for their minor daily activities to help us with organizing the event which helps all the Perl programmers to achieve better results and to the Perl language to develop. Read our Sponsorship Proposal; we are open for any discussions about the conditions and things that we offer to the sponsors.

What are the plans for the first half of 2013?

Well, we already did everything we need and now can just sit and wait while all the above numbers grow by themselves :-)

Seriously speaking, we need to make a huge number of different things. Among them, polishing the site and launching a few pages, such as the page about Kiev sightseeing, hotel reservation, preparing wiki pages etc.

We will also work on gathering the best available talks and speakers so that we have big and well packed schedule. I would also like to have the Speaker training before the conference. I am convinced that even one day before the conference is enough to improve the quality of a number of talks. You can submit a talk right now.

We also need to organise the River Cruise and catering services both for the cruise and the main talks days of the conference. Not counting the pre-conference meeting and Perl 6 hackathon. (We are still waiting for somebody to lead the Perl 5 hackathon.)

We also work on the ways letting the attendees to book a hotel for a minimal available price, which, I think, should become one of the obligatory tasks for the organisers of the future events. Also we will try to open an air flight ticket search page to help finding and buying the cheapest tickets (basically, I am waiting when our partner will make the English version of their site).

So, there are lots of things to do in the following months. Some of them are difficult, some are easy enough. All in all, the work we do is not only needed for making the great conference once a year but also moves the Perl programming language into the future, delivering the Future Perl today.

Conference dates confirmation

25/12/12 18:24 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

We now officially announce the dates of the conference. YAPC::Europe 2013 in Kiev will be held on 12–14 August 2013 (Monday to Wednesday).

Site launched

24/12/12 00:58 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Today we launch the site of our conference. You may now register, submit a talk and buy a ticket.

In the following weeks we will add a hotel reservation page and hope to offer the attendees discounts for booking the rooms in Kiev.

Week minus 33. Countdown correction. Dates. Site

23/12/12 17:18 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees and those who would like to come to Kiev in August 2013,

We are very happy to announce the launch of the conference site: yapc.eu/2013.

Together with that, I am correcting the week countdown counter: there's no week minus 34, and the week -35 is followed by the week -33. The dates of the conference are 12-14 August 2013. There's a negligible small change that the dates will be changed, so we will make additional announcement when we are ready. It's Christmas and New Year time, that's why we have to wait a little bit more to be 100% sure. Vyacheslav vti and Anatoly sharifulin have just returned from Saint Petersburg where they attended the celebration of the 25th birthday of Perl, which is a good excuse :-)

Anyway, if you plan to go to Kiev for the next YAPC::Europe, please register on the site. If you attended one of the previous YAPCs (not necessarily ::Europe edition), you may log in with your account on the Act system. Please don't forget to press the Join button (a red link in the site user menu will be calling you to do that).

If you wish to give a talk at the conference, you can already submit it. We set three different time lengths for the talks: 20, 40 and 60 minutes. One hour talk is only accepted for more-than-just-a-talk versions, such as small teaching classes or in-depth tutorials. As usual, we will glad if you submit a lightning talks. We hope to have three sessions of lightning talks, one at the end of each day.

We have also opened a payment system, and you can buy a ticket (20+-minute speakers do not have to do that). This year, the standard price is set to 110 €. The early bird price is 90 €, and the price for the students is 60 €. The price of one ticket for the corporate users is 400 €.

Finally, we are publishing the Sponsorship Proposal. If you or your company would like to help organising the conference and agree to sponsor us, please contact us at mail@yapcrussia.org. Beyond the official proposal we are ready to discuss other variants and sizes of sponsorship if you will not find an option that is suitable for you.

During the following weeks we will be updating and polishing our site. For instance, we will add a page about Kiev sightseeing. Also, we plan opening a hotel reservation page so that you can book a hotel with a discount. I will discuss the partnership with leading Russian booking reservation site (they also use Perl together with Python and Go) this week.

That's all for today. We wish you a Merry Christmas and we will be back in a week with more news about the conference!

Week minus 35. Extra activities

16/12/12 17:18 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Hi,

This week I didn't fix the countdown week counter but I think I will do it next time. This week Viacheslav (vti) was negotiating the contract with the venue, and I am happy to tell you that he managed to save a few thousand euros by reorganising the room configuration that was initially proposed. We did not lose any space, and we still have the big and nice concert hall, so no worries. Huge thanks to vti! We hope to sign the contract next week.

It is very likely that we will have no extra paid classes around the conference. But still, if you are reading this and would like to give a class, please contact us.

We'd like to organise a Speaker Training on the day before the conference for those who would like to polish, correct, or completely rewrite their slides to make them better and more useful. We are in contact with the trainer we want this training to lead, and we will share the details as soon as we have them. The training is supposed to be on Sunday morning.

Another activity, that we will organise before the conference, is the Perl 6 hackathon. Jonathan Worthington (jnthn) was very kind to agree leading it. This event is scheduled to Sunday 11th August, the day before the conference. We did a Perl 6 hackathon in Riga in 2011, and it was a nice event that not only let all the main people behind Perl 6 to gather together, but also was warm for the newcomers who wanted to get a deeper insight into Perl 6 development.

I would also like to host a Perl 5 hackathon in parallel with the Perl 6 one. Please contact us at mail@yapcrussia.org if you would like to participate in it and what topics might be covered there. Unfortunately, I have no idea of the current Perl 5 internals and development processes there, so I am not the best person to plan this event.

For the hackaton(s) we will to reserve a room in the Dnipro hotel nearby the venue.

Next week: date announcement, site launch, call for speakers, and the start of selling tickets :-)

Week minus 36. A brief update

09/12/12 17:17 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear attendees,

We are very close to signing the contract with the venue. There are a number of things we have to do before we finally sign it. So, please excuse us for doing that so long. We have to negotiate, for example, the place for catering, internet connectivity infrastructure, sound and media equipment, -- all that goes into the contract.

Today I will quote the site of our venue, The Ukrainian House (ukrdim.org.ua, UA). We will rent the following rooms.

Concert hall (782 m²). The room for hosting concerts, literature and art events, congresses, conferences and presentations. It has 490 stationary seats, the stage and a screen. It is equipped with theater, regular and dynamic lightening systems (whatever that means :-) and the 7 kW system of sound amplification. There is a direct connection with the radio studio nearby.

Large exhibition hall (300 m²). The hall is oriented for hosting art exhibitions. It can host expositions during specialised exhibitions. It was used as a press centre during the visit of Bill Clinton, Pope John Paul II, and during annual meetings of the European bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Small exhibition hall (150 m²). The hall is used as a place for art exhibitions and vernisages.

The venue already ensured us that they have enough wireless capacity to let the attendees use their devices.

As for the hotels, I personally intend to stay at the Dnipro hotel, which is situated in 150 meters from the venue across the European square. This hotel is not only the closest one to the venue, but also the best in quality to price ratio, comparing to other big hotels in the city centre. There is free Wi-Fi in the rooms, including the cheapest ones. We will do our best to find ways to let the attendees book this (as well as others) hotel at the lowest price.

Stay tuned.

Week minus 37. More ideas about extra programme

01/12/12 17:17 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear Perl users,

Two weeks ago I mentioned a couple of activities that I found nice to have in the conference. Today I will tell about other things that we already tested during our previous events.

In 2009, at YAPC::Russia in Moscow Alex Kapranov hosted the Game of the Future, where we were trying to predict the future of Perl and related things. There were a few groups that were compiling the future based on probable or improbable events that might happen in a few years, as well as on the known facts. As a result, a mind map was build, which is quite interesting to read today:

What is the future of Perl.pdf

You may find a number of region-specific items there but the funniest thing is that we were considering the YAPC::Europe in Kiev an unlikely event at that time.

Another fresh idea was implemented at one of the Russian Perl Workshops in Saint Petersburg (codenamed SaintPerl). Alex Kotov, the principal organizer of this event series, proposed a rage contest. The attendees were asked to create rage comics, and they all were demonstrated at the workshop closing session. There are plenty of online constructors for creating comics in that style.

Next week, I hope, we will announce the final dates of the conference and will open the site. Stay tuned!

Week minus 38. In Kiev as a tourist

25/11/12 17:16 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Not too many news about the conference today, although I made a visit to Kiev as a bare tourist (well, actually, as a fan of one of the actors) and this note is about that.

Last Friday I went to Kiev from Amsterdam with a connection in Frankfurt (I did not realise until now that the connection was in the host city of the previous YAPC::Europe).

Even with a connection it was extremely easy flight, and not too long, something about three hours in the air. The ticket costs 213 €.

Kiev built a new terminal in their main airport Borispil (KBP). There's another one, but I have never been there. The airport is quite remote from the city, and if you use a taxi, you should spend about 20-25 € depending on which area of the city you are going to. Note that if you catch a cab you may expect to find a taximeter there, which I did not see a year ago, and that fact is just great.

There are still quite a few symbols of the Euro-2012 in the city.

You will also see more automata when you need to buy a metro ticket. And it costs only 0.2 € per trip, can you imagine that? Buy 5 tickets for 1 euro! Ugly looking but working, unlike the ones in Moscow.

My destination was a theatre in one of the streets running from Khreschatyk, so, having not too much time, I simply enjoyed walking along it, eating traditional perepichka (unhealthy, I think, food, but having the taste of Kiev's history).

I also hanged out in the book shop nearby (after Amsterdam, it is such a pleasure to dive into the place with thousands books in so adorable languages, Russian and Ukrainian, not mentioning the cafe in this three-storey bookshop).

I can also confirm that you will find free Wi-Fi in McDonalds (heh, another piece of unhealthy food :-) I discovered there that there will be a documentary with the 70 minute lost interview with Steve Jobs in the cinema nearby, which perfectly fit into my schedule. So, another hour and a half in my favourite cinema in Kiev Kiev with pop corn and Cola (I was hardly thinking if pop corn is compatible with Apple). This is remarkable because this time I took neither a laptop, nor a camera with me and used only iPhone 5 and iPad mini during the whole trip (these new devises are very technologically attractive, although an iPad lost a pixel on its screen after six hours in the air, probably suffering from the increased radiation).

Then I examined the venue. It stands on its place :-) By the way, once again I noticed that from the outside it doesn't look like a five-storey building.

Since long ago there's no single year when I do not visit Kiev at least once (usually more). The conclusion I made is: you always can find somebody or something protesting on the streets. This time is a long-living alley with tents and exhibition Yanukovych vs. Tymoshenko.

At our first Ukrainian Perl Workshop in Kiev in 2008, Peter Edwards and Jonathan Worthington made photos at the doors of jewellery shop named Perlina. Now the owners of it finally agreed that only the first four letters make real sense (Перл is Cyrillic version of Perl).

A short stay in the hotel for a couple of hours for quick rest, and then back to the KBP airport.

Then Munich MUC airport (with its barbed wired fences), and then AMS with an hour delay because of strong fog both in MUC and AMS.

Kiev is a great city, which, while really suffering from lots of modern changes, is still charming and attractive. See you there in August.

Week minus 39. Some ideas about the extended programme

18/11/12 17:16 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Hi,

Today I'd like to compile a list of events that would be nice to have in the extended programme of the conference. As you may know from our previous weekly newsletters there will be no auction in Kiev, at least there will be no live auction which became boring and unnecessary during the last few years (let's don't think about money we could raise there).

What other things can we find entertaining?

Perl Quiz. If you were lucky to attend the dinner at YAPC::Europe in Lisbon you may not only remember that there were plenty of food, dozens of types of meat, but also there was a quiz lead by Damian Conway. A few teams were answering different questions about Perl and its community. Some questions were very easy from the first look but were quite difficult to answer, which made the quiz very entertaining event.

Photo by cowfish

Perl Golf. We hosted the Perl Golf contest at YAPCs::Russia in 2008 and 2009 leading by Andrey Zavyalov. There were small tasks that should be solved during the days of the conference, and at the end we looked at different solutions, the shorter they were the more interesting to understand how they worked. Notably, the participants were able to make their code shorter using the say operator for printing the output. Here is one of the solutions using say:

($n,@s)=<>;for$b(1..$n){$n% $b||do{for$x(0..-$b-1+length$s[0]) {for$y(0..@s-$n/$b){$c=0;$c+=@{[substr($s[$y+$_],$x,$b)=~/#/g]} for(0..$n/$b-1);$_=$c if$_<$c}}}}say

I encourage you to think of more nice ideas for the YAPC::Europe to make the conference more vibrant and entertaining.

Week minus 40. Announcing the Venue

11/11/12 17:15 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Today we announce that the YAPC::Europe 2013 in Kiev will be held in the Ukrainian House national centre, a five-storey building in the very centre of Kiev.

Let's first give a word to the official site of the venue.

The Ukrainian House is situated on the main street of the capital city, Kreschatyk Street. It stands at the beginning of a street like the root note of a chord.

Ukrainian House has a simple, uncluttered structure. Crisply rhythmic pylons and white marble walls, coupled with red granite, give it its monumentality. The total area of the building is 17.550 m2, including 8850 m2 of exhibition area.

The Ukrainian House is located in the city centre, where the business, political and artistic life of Kiev is concentrated. There are comfortable hotels, numerous restaurants, cafes and bars nearby.

The solemnity and formality of the facades and interiors of the building create the necessary background for hosting various events, large both in terms of volume and of content: forums, symposia, conferences, presentations, seminars, press conferences, scientific, technical, commercial and industrial exhibitions, cultural and artistic events, opening days, shops, auctions, festivals, concerts and spectacular entertainment.

Ukrainian house is a five-storey building with underground blocks for technical equipment, ensuring uninterrupted air conditioning, power supply and heating. The house is equipped with eight escalators and two passenger lifts.

Spacious rooms, galleries, halls and a lobby constitute not only an example of impeccable design with marble, granite, aluminium, absorbing plates and other high quality materials, but are also part of the high potential technical equipment buildings.

The venue is a five-minute walk from the central square, and a ten-minute walk from the Dnieper River.

We would rent three rooms for the conference:

• A theatre-style main room with 490 seats, equipped with audio and multimedia facilities.
• Two or three smaller rooms with approximately 100 seats apiece, depending on the number of talk tracks.

The venue is equipped for disabled access. Also, note the uninterrupted air conditioning :-)

I believe we made the right choice. No doubt the venue will increase the attractiveness of the YAPC as a conference. Even though it is still a grassroots event, it can be hosted in a great building. As a separate bonus, the venue has a big hall area.

GPS location: 50.453207, 30.526843.

We plan to sign a contract within the coming weeks. After that, we will be able to fix and announce the dates of the conference.

We will also examine the Wi-Fi infrastructure of the building to make sure it will work during the conference, taking into account all the numerous devices you may bring.

There are two hotels located close to the venue: Dnipro Hotel, right in front of the House, and Khreschatyk Hotel, just around the corner.

(Hmm, I have stayed in Khreschatyk before, and I booked it again for my next visit in a couple of weeks. Now I'm curious as to why I did not test Dnipro yet. Maybe I will rebook my order after publishing this post. It's always nice to have your own experience.)

Of course, there are lots of other hotels located very close to the venue we selected, as it is the city centre.

Week minus 41. Venues

04/11/12 17:13 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi summarises his trip over the venues in Kiev during the last few weeks. He did a huge job and now the huge job for us is to pick up the best venue :-)

As I am in the org team of the next YAPC::Europe in Kiev, I have some news about the venues. I have been visiting all the previous selected 7 venues and 2 new that we found on the way. Not an easy task I should say. So here is my report.

Ukrainian House

Ukrainian House is a nice huge city-centered place, it has the best view actually. The only downside is price :) We really want to get this place, so we are trying out different strategies of balancing the budget.

MasterClass

MasterClass is a nice venue near historical center, but it doesn't have enough space to accept and feed 300 visitors.

President Hotel

President Hotel is one the most expensive hotels in Kiev, so the price is corresponding. And it's not very easy to reach with the public transportation.

Parus Business Center

Parus Business Center is pretty close to the center (10-15min walk). When I visited this venue the office manager even asked me 'Perl? Does anyone still program on it?'. I laughed and kindly explained him that YES, WE DO!

European University

European University is a great place but somewhat distant from the city center. Also the halls are on different floors.

Hotel Bratislava

Hotel Bratislava. Unfortunately I coudn't see any of the halls, because it was under renovation. Also it is on another side of the river.

NSC Olimpiyskiy

NSC Olimpiyskiy. This is the main football stadium in Ukraine. It'd be great to have a conference here, unfortunately is it overpriced and very dependent on the local football games. We could end up with canceling the conference.

Hotel Rus

Hotel Rus. This hotel has a great name. Rus is the name of the medieval polity in Europe which used to unite many slavic tribes. And Kiev was the capital. This hotel has a big hall that can be divided into smaller parts. I like this approach so the attendees won't need to run between different floors. This was kinda the same on YAPC::Brazil 2012 (what a great place btw :). It is very close to the Parus Business center.

M17: Contemporary Art Center

Contemporary Art Center has a big hall mainly dedicated for exibitions. The main downside is that they cannot be divided into parts with good sound isolation.

That's it

So this is it. Now we are deciding which one is going to win. Help us decide using the comment section below.

Thank you!

Week minus 42. Food

28/10/12 17:13 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

I hope you expect that we announce the date and place of the next YAPC::Europe in Kiev, but please be patient a little bit more. Next week Viacheslav visits a venue where a PyCon was held and after that we select the venue. It is a difficult choice as we don't have now exact budget and the venue rent cost strongly varies. It would be much easier to decide after the attendees pay :-)

Anyway, let's talk today about eating during and around the conference. There are four different type of food supply we have to organise.

1) Pre-conference meeting; 2) Coffee breaks during the conference days; 3) Lunches; 4) Attendees dinner.

Food at a pre-confernece meeting is simple. We invite everybody and depending on the level of sponsorship we get we offer either nothing, or beer, or beer and snacks. It is also possible for any company to become a Pre-conference meeting sponsor right now.

The last position, attendees dinner, is also easy. We do not organise it this time :-) Instead, we propose a river cruise after the second day with beer, wine and snacks.

Coffee breaks. I think everybody agrees that there should be two of them during a day, and looking back to Riga I think it's better to start hungry (people come from their hotels where a breakfast is usually served) and have the first break after the first talk which usually is a long keynote given by one of our guest speakers. The same with the second break: it comes before the last section in the daily schedule, which I think again will be a session of lightning talks. Light snacks and cookies, fruits and tea/coffee are more than enough to let our bodies forget about food and concentrate on Perl talks and Perl community.

And now we come to the main question: what to do with lunches. At my first YAPC, which was Vienna, there were no lunches served in the venue, and the attendees were asked to go to the cafeteria located near the entrance to the university. Honestly, for the first YAPC I was a bit frustrated because I did know what to do, should I pay or not, where do I have to sit and when do I have to return to the venue. Yeah, such an easy task may turn a stressful story for a YAPC beginner.

In Copenhagen, they prepared cold packages with food, including vegetarian packages served in a big canteen located inside the venue. Attendee logistics was much more pleasant this time, although cold food is not always a great choice.

In Riga, we asked a brilliant Sala cafe (an Island in Latvian) to serve everything for us, and the team of about ten people leading by Gunta Rasmane did a great job. There were lots of hot food for the dinner, as well as various cookies and snacks during the day.

What we missed were labels naming the food and its contents. And we also ordered too much cookies, thus we had to bring them out of the canteen to the hall areas so that they disappear before the end of the day.

Another option of having a lunch is to let people go outside and find a place themselves. We did that trick a number of times during YAPC::Russia events both in Kiev and Moscow, and mostly every time it took more than an hour to have people back (or, at least the majority). For me it's too much to let the lunch last more than an hour. But self-serving means that we don't need to pay for everyone :-)

So our question today is a binary one: Do you think that a conference ticket should cover lunches? Please be active with this poll before, not after the conference.

And to finalise today's topic, here's a video from the attendees dinner in Riga. I think we might expect even more enjoyable food in Kiev!

Week minus 43. Hotels

21/10/12 17:12 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Last week we talked about air tickets, thus let's talk about hotels now.

Basically, there are lots of hotels in Kiev with a wide price range. It's worth to spend some time to find the most appropriate variant for your needs. There are hotels and hostels in Kiev, or you may rent an apartment.

Our previous events in Kiev show that it's safe and reliable to rent a flat in Kiev, although you should know that before the EURO-2012 there appeared a number of fake or unreasonably expensive places. We hope it is now completely gone, but please be sure to double check if you are going to rent a flat with no reviews, contacts etc. As there are no more global EURO football events in Kiev in 2013, you may expect affordable prices for the hotels of all types.

You may explore the hotels in Kiev right now using our special page: yapc.travel/2013/ye2013. This page will become the official page of hotel reservations for the conference. We will make it better and more informative very soon. For now, click on the hotels to see their prices.

When we know the dates, you will be able to book the hotels from there via our future partner. We encourage you not to only explore the map but also book from that page so that we can raise some additional money for the conference. Although we are not going to propose a dedicated conference hotel with discounts, our plan is to negotiate with the partners so that you can pay minimum price available on internet for each of the hotels.

If can missed Yaroslav's introduction to Kiev during the YAPC::Europe in Frankfurt, please make sure you feel the spirit of Kiev from the following video which (and that's very handful for us) was made to promote the EURO 2012.

Follow us on Twitter for more news about the YAPC::Europe 2013 in Kiev.

Week minus 44. Air tickets

14/10/12 17:11 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

This week we explored another two venues and went to a small vacations: one of the organisers is at his honeymoon and another one goes to YAPC::Brasil. So let's talk a bit about travelling and see the prices to Kiev from different European cities for mid-August 2013, in Euro.

Albania	Tirana	294
Austria	Vienna	240
Belarus	Minsk	183
Belgium	Brussels	215
Bulgaria	Sofia	207
Croatia	Zagreb	211
Czech Republic	Prague	204
Denmark	Copenhagen	190
Estonia	Tallinn	115
Finland	Helsinki	157
France	Paris	192
Germany	Berlin	236
Great Britain	London	195
Greece	Athens	212
Hungary	Budapest	207
Iceland	Reykjavik	664
Ireland	Dublin	233
Italy	Rome	218
Latvia	Riga	159
Lithuania	Vilnius	123
Moldova	Chisinau	212
The Netherlands	Amsterdam	176
Norway	Oslo	189
Poland	Warsaw	155
Portugal	Lisbon	292
Romania	Bucharest	194
Russia	Moscow	128
Serbia	Belgrade	186
Slovenia	Ljubljana	259
Spain	Madrid	218
Sweden	Stockholm	180
Switzerland	Geneve, Zurich	262

We hope to implement a ticket search page on the conference website.

Keep in touch, follow us on Twitter.

Week minus 45. Future 5 vs. Future 6

07/10/12 17:11 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

This week there were a couple of contradictory messages on our Twitter which triggered a small discussion.

Being a joke of what is more important at the conference, either talks on Perl 5 or talks on Perl 6, those two tweets contain a mixture of feelings behind them.

The major problem with Perl 6 talks is that there are many attendees to the conference who are not very interested in that version of the language. There's nothing wrong with this opinion, and we respect the attendees who come to the conference to learn new things about Perl 5, and we will always support this part of the audience.

On the other hand, the development of Perl 6 itself gives not too many reasons to include many Perl 6 talks, as it did not become yet a language suitable for production systems. I think, it is clear for a few years, that there are people in Perl community who would be very happy to start using Perl 6, and would also continue with Perl 5 in their projects.

I think we also can host a one-day Perl 6 hackathon as we did in Riga. Or even a Perl 5 hackathon if there are enthusiasts for this kind of event.

Let's now just look at the Past, and see what were the talks given in the previous years, the years before the conference in Kiev named Future Perl. Note that there were lots of talks given about Parrot, not exactly on Perl 6.

2002 Damian Conway. Perl 6 Prospective Dan Sugalski. Inside Parrot

2003 Marty Pauley. ‎Perl6 ideas stolen from Japanese‎ Leopold Toetsch. ‎Parrot Overview Leopold Toetsch. ‎Of Ops and Mops - or how the code gets executed‎ Léon Brocard. ‎Little Languages in Parrot‎ Dan Sugalski. ‎The State of Parrot‎ Arthur Bergman. Ponie: Perl on New Internal Engine‎

2004 Parrot

2005 Leopold Toetsch. ‎News about Parrot‎ Christian Aperghis-Tramoni. ‎Using Parrot machine as a pedagogic platform‎

2006 Jonathan Worthington. Sorry, you're not my type Adrian Howard. Perl Eye for the Ruby Guy Leopold Tötsch. Introduction to Parrot Leopold Tötsch. Parrot Specials Allison Randal. The Parrot Compiler Tools Jonathan Worthington. Translating .Net Libraries To Parrot MarkOv & Sam Vilain. CPAN6, CPAN for Perl6

2007 Juerd Waalboer. ‎Social Perl 6 - Getting the most out of your tuits‎ Jonathan Worthington. Playing with bird guts‎ Damian Conway. ‎Perl 6 Update‎ Flavio Glock. ‎Adventures in Perl6 Wim Vanderbauwhede. ‎The 'runpugs' web terminal: Run Perl 6 now -- in your browser!‎ Jonathan Worthington. ‎Playing with bird guts‎ Allison Randal. Parrot Hackathon‎

2008 Nuno Carvalho. ‎Beautiful Parrot‎ Patrick Michaud. ‎Building Compilers with the Parrot Compiler Toolkit‎ Patrick Michaud. ‎Rakudo: Perl 6 on Parrot‎ Paweł Murias. ‎Perl 6 is just a SMOP‎ Mark Overmeer. ‎CPAN6 Under Construction‎ Jonathan Worthington. ‎Object Orientation, The Perl 6 Way‎ Jonathan Worthington. ‎Putting Types To Work In Perl 6‎

2009 Damian Conway. Perl 6 update‎ Patrick Michaud. ‎Hacking Rakudo Perl 6‎ Jonathan Worthington. ‎Perl 6 Roles In Depth Martin Berends. ‎Perl 6 for Perl 5 Programmers‎ Carl Mäsak ‎Perl 6 ♥ the Web‎

2010 Patrick Michaud. ‎Rakudo Star - A usable Perl 6 release‎ Carl Mäsak. ‎Perl 6 appetizers‎ Moritz Lenz. ‎Perl 6 and The Real World‎ Jonathan Worthington. ‎Perl 6 Signatures: The Full Story‎ Andrew Shitov. ‎Using text in search requests with examples in Perl 6‎ Martin Berends. ‎Perl 6 Database Interfacing Tim Bunce. ‎DBDI: A Foundation For Database Access In Perl 6‎ Patrick Michaud. ‎Not Quite Perl (NQP) - A lightweight Perl 6‎ Carl Mäsak. ‎Perl 6: Prince of Parsea‎

2011 Jonathan Worthington. ‎Rakudo Evolved: speed, feedback and hackability‎ Damian Conway. Developing in Perl 6‎ Patrick Michaud. ‎Perl 6 Lists, Arrays, and Hashes vivified: lazy, infinite, flat, slurpy, typed, bound, and LoL'd‎ Jonathan Worthington. ‎Debugging Perl 6 Grammars‎

2012 Jonathan Worthington. ‎Exceptional Perl 6‎ Patrick Michaud. ‎Perl 6 Documentation -- The Good, The Bad and the Missing‎

The year 2012 is an example of Perl 6's nature: not only it gives new features back to Perl but it also allows more space for Perl 6 talks: according to the comment left by the organisers in Frankfurt, willing to give a word for the Perl 6 speakers, they added the fourth track, where even more Perl 5 talks were placed.

Speaking of myself (not as an organiser of the conference in Kiev but as a Perl lover), I would like that Perl 6 always contains the spirit of passion, hope and future as it was in 2007:

All in all, we are very open to both Perl 5 and Perl 6 talks, both practical and theoretical, and encourage the speakers to submit their talks (as soon as we launch the website :-).

Week minus 46. Another 2% off

30/09/12 17:10 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

The time has made its 2% and brought us one week closer to the YAPC::Europe 2013 in Kiev!

This time our main news is that we are also closer to the point when we are able to fix and announce the dates of the conference. This week we explored a couple more venues, and there are only two left in our list.

Interestingly, we found a venue we did not met before, and it is the venue that a Python Pycon conference is exploiting in October. So far, there're President Hotel and European University that we will see in the following days. And then -- we select the venue based on different metrics :-)

About the dates, it is also becoming less fuzzy. Most likely it will be 5-7 or 12-14 August 2013, both Monday to Wednesday. (But please please don't buy your tickets yet :-) Looking back, there were a few conferences both in the beginning of August and in its middle weeks, and there's no direct correlation between the date and the number of attendees.

The dates of the previous YAPCs::Europe look like a scale on the old radio:

Of course, we will check if there are any events of other IT conferences around the dateы and let the organisers of local summer workshops know about the date asap.

Stay tuned! More exciting news coming very soon.

Week minus 47. Venue Research

23/09/12 17:09 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

There was a tweet from Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi last Friday: My life during last weeks: waking up early to visit the next venue for yapc :-). Do you know what stands behind that less-than-140-character message?

In Barbie's Perl Jam book, there's a section called Research Your Venue where you can see a list of problems arising before the organisers: finding a venue, requirements for the main auditorium, floor plan layout, breakout area, storage room, hackathon and BOF rooms, speaker preparation rooms, accessibility, internet connectivity and Wi-Fi, location, cost, catering, dietary requirements, morning and afternoon breaks, lunch, dinner, early arrivals dinner. The things in this list following catering combine a separate list of headache reasons for the organisers.

For the conference in Kiev we've got seven different venues in mind, and I would like to thank the guys in Kiev, Viacheslav and Yaroslav, for helping with both preparing a list of potential places and doing hard work of detailed exploring them one by one. Viacheslav is the main force behind that.

In our internal wiki (an instance of MediaWiki in PHP :-) we keep a table where we make notes about venue parameters, including their price. It will help us to make a decision after we explore all the venues. I hope this will be done before the end of this year, presumably in November.

Here is our primary checklist:

- Big room with 300 to 400 seats. - Two or three rooms for 100 people. - Hall space. - Lunch area. - Catering facilities. - Two coffee breaks a day. - Wireless internet access for 300+ devices. - Open SSH etc. ports. - Multimedia projectors and screens. - Additional projector or big monitor in the hall. - Microphones on the stage. - Microphones in the room (at least in the main one). - Possibility to connect your laptop's video. - Possibility to connect your laptop's audio. - Sound recording. - Video recording. - Power supply. - Venue access (whether the attendees need to have any documents with them). - Price. - Discounts. - The size and date of prepayment.

Each of the items is not just a boolean value but rather a container keeping lots of details. For example, catering may include just a space for a break, or the venue may force to buy their food, or it may include the need to search for the cafes outside. Or the rooms for talk tracks: smaller rooms may be physical or virtual, that is it may be configured from a part of hall areas, which is not always great.

When I prepared a proposal for hosting YAPC::Europe in Kiev a few years ago, I approached couple of local universities (which are by default the most suitable venues for any conference). One of them was rather curious in that it was not possible to rent the venue to have three subsequent days within a week because they had an agreement with some local non-official church who gathered two times a week there, every Sunday and Wednesday. More to add to this strange situation, when we discussed the details, the director of the venue spoke to me in Ukrainian while I talked to her in Russian. I still don't know what that was and why. I have no problems with understanding Ukrainian but I also believe she had no problems speaking correct Russian. It's like when you speak Italian and receive answers in Spanish.

All in all, once again thanks to the guys in Kiev for their detailed research. We will keep you informed and announce the date and the address as soon as we can.

Please also follow, subscribe, connect, visit and like the following links related to us, the organisers team.

Personal Twitter accounts, listed alphabetically by last name.

twitter.com/ykorshak twitter.com/vtivti twitter.com/sharifulin twitter.com/andrewshitov

Our Facebook profiles:

facebook.com/yaroslav.korshak facebook.com/viacheslav.tykhanovskyi facebook.com/sharifulin facebook.com/ashport

Our blogs:

showmetheco.de (Viacheslav's English blog) sharifulin.posterous.com (Anatoly blogs in Russian) blog.shitov.ru (I also blog in Russian mainly)

Official YAPC::Europe 2013 Twitter accounts:

twitter.com/yapcrussia (we keep it as the main one this year). twitter.com/yapceu (don't forget to follow this one as it will became the only official place since 2014).

YAPC::Europe Facebook page:

facebook.com/yapceu

I would also like to ask you give more feedback in comments to our postings. Currently only a provocative experimental personal post may cause a burst :-) Reading your reaction would really help to make the conference better and better satisfy your expectations. Or mail us at mail@yapcrussia.org.

Week minus 48

16/09/12 17:09 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

This week we publish an interview with one of the YAPC::Europe 2013 organisers, that was recorded for the recent Yet Another Perl Podcast on 13 September.

Dear listeners, this is the second issue of the second season of Yet Another Perl Podcast, the podcast about Perl in Russian. Here today are myself, Alexander aka Afiskon Alexeev, Dmitry Degtyarev and our today's guest, Perl's rock star Vyacheslav vti Tikhanovskiy. This issue is basically a chat with him.

-- What does it mean, a non-religious developer, as it is stated on your blog?

-- Before answering this question, let me say that a rock star is an exaggeration. As for the non-religious, there're two meanings here. First, I'm non-religious literary, second, Perl is not a religion for me, I can easily use any other programming language or any utilities, be it in Perl or not.

-- But you still think of yourself as of Perl developer, right?

-- Mostly yes, that's right. It is mainly Perl, but as I said, it is possible to go outside.

-- How far did you go outside already, what do you know that you can use with ease?

-- Confess, do you write in PHP?

-- No, I don't use PHP and even never tried. There are no tasks for PHP at hand.

-- What else do you use?

-- It is mainly C, low-level programming. JavaScript, of course. And I write lots of bash scripts.

-- What's on your desktop? Linux?

-- Yes, Ubuntu.

-- Despite the fact that you are a mac user, aren't you?

-- Yes.

-- An interesting choice. Why, if you can explain?

-- I'm used to Linux at my work, it was not comfortable enough to constantly set up an environment, and I installed Ubuntu, that is how it was.

-- Tell us please, what influenced you and what made you choose Perl when you were considering the languages to use. Or you don't think that you already did the choice?

-- There were no any selection of the language. There was a task, I don't remember exactly what that was. And it began in Perl, I did no choice.

-- How long do you program in Perl consciously?

-- I don't remember exactly. Since the institute, maybe since 2004 or 2005.

-- You are a productive programmer and create a few public projects a year.

-- The projects I do in my spare time, yes, I can call them productive.

-- How many projects in Perl are there in a year, did you ever count?

-- It's difficult to say. A random task comes, and there's no solution on CPAN. Indeed, it's a rare case but it leads to a new module or a site. I can't give you an exact number.

-- One of your recent projects that we saw is perltuts.com. What caused you to make it, what did you lack, why? How did the idea come?

-- I wanted to look at Ruby, they've got a site, RubyMonk, there're online lessons there, which you can quickly pass and lean Ruby basics. I thought it could be done in Perl too. And here it comes.

-- How many tutorials are there on Perltuts today?

-- Four or five, I believe.

-- So a newbie in Perl visits a site, and in future there will be a set of tasks to help with learning the language, right?

-- In theory, yes.

-- Interactive online tutorial.

-- Yes, indeed, this is the goal.

-- How can I add a lesson there? It there code on githib?

-- You can download every lesson and read it offline. The only value the site adds is that you can run a code sample there. You can easily download a POD file, examine its structure and create your own tutorial. You can't upload it at the moment, but you can ask me to do that. There is no site code on github yet, I was going to publish it, but had no time yet. To write a tutorial you don't need any code. Just make a simple POD and that's it.

-- OK, let's move on to the most interesting question. Tell us about the YAPC::Europe. What's on in 2013, there should be something very important, right?

-- Yes. It was announced during the last conference in Frankfurt that the next conference will be held in Kiev, and we work hard on it and would also like to see all the programmers from the CIS countries who was not able to come to the conference in Europe before because of different reasons. It is a unique opportunity to meet and see the famous Perl programmers, that's why we are very impatient. I hope everything will be great.

-- Is it right that the preparations are already in process? If so, how do they look like? Do you call the hotels and tell that you want to make a conference?

-- Sure. Before the bid for the city is published, we always need to find a few potential venues. There are a number of conditions and restrictions. Behind the venue stands the general city infrastructure which is considered, the cost of getting there, sightseeing areas etc., etc.

-- Who are the organisers of the conference?

-- Of course, it's Andrew Shitov who organise everything, Yaroslav Korshak and me, and also Anatoly Sharifulin who joined us recently. Thus there are four of us.

-- As the organisers, do you search for the venue, right? Look for sponsors?

-- Yes, everyone is doing what he can.

-- And the most intriguing: tell those who don't read your blog, who will come there?

-- We contacted (well, Andrew did) Larry Wall, Damian Conway and Matt S. Trout. I guess there's no need to explain who they are. And they preliminary agreed and look forward to coming to Kiev, thus we expect their plans won't change.

-- Did you also contact Sebastian Riedel?

-- No, we did not. As far as I remember from the past, he's strongly against attending any Perl events, so I even don't know if it's worth to invite him. Maybe someone will do that.

-- Back to your projects, in particular web projects, it's interesting to note that most of them are built with Dancer. Why Dancer and not Mojolicious which is so popular now?

-- In the past, my projects were based on Mojolicious, now on Dancer. Well, not everything, maybe a couple of them. This is because the projects are not difficult, and I need them to be stable and long-living.

-- As a framework, is it enough for you?

-- In commercial projects I use other frameworks, for sure, but for simple sites Dancer is just right.

-- What do you use in commercial projects?

-- There are custom frameworks with their application specifics suitable for particular tasks. There's nothing single and common at the moment. Every project uses some repeated basic functional but every one has its features.

-- Did you ever notice which function in your Perl code is most frequent?

-- A function? I don't use functions, I use methods only. Maybe it's a constructor :-)

-- What do you think of dependencies in Perl code? I mean, CPAN modules.

-- It's useful of course but again I'm not a fanatic here. If some narrow task is solved with a particular module with good history, why not save time and force. I only agree.

-- Can you recall which module was the first that you installed from CPAN?

-- No, it's difficult to remember. Template::Toolkit maybe.

-- So, still web?

-- Yes.

-- You are mostly a web programmer, aren't you?

-- Yes, mostly I am.

-- BTW, your blog appears to be in English. Why is it so?

-- Probably because the audience is bigger. It's a fact that there are more writings in English about Perl. Thus more chances to get a feedback.

-- So English is not a self-goal for you?

-- No, it is more like a method for getting bigger audience.

(Dmitry) -- Back to the CPAN. Is there a module that you as a developer use everywhere? Not counting Dancer, of course.

(Afiskon) -- I can name at least two. They are Try::Tiny and Carp.

(vti) -- I used Try::Tiny until I've read a discussion somewhere that it was slow, and now I use bare eval, and eval or do. It localises the variable with an error, and no problems usually arise. Try::Tiny doesn't solve the problem. To catch an exception you still need to write ifs, test isa class etc. There is also a nice module Error::Simple but unfortunately it is not maintained for a long time and nobody recommends to use it. But it offers the most handy interface for exceptions. No ifs, just a catch block, just name the classes and immediately get the block where you can handle an exception.

-- There is a language, called Perl 6, which is very very good for working with exceptions. As well with classes. I tried it, I liked it and even created three modules already. Did you try Perl 6 and what do you think about it?

-- I am positive about it. It is nice when something is developing and when a new language influences other languages and the industry in whole but it is not for use yet, there're no advantages yet.

-- We talked earlier to Andrew Shitov, who said that Perl 6 probably has no future [Did I say that?? -- Ash.] and it has done its job bringing new and useful ideas back to Perl 5. Do you think that the language has its future?

-- I also think it is not for use in production now but it's still possible to be a successful if not in production but in influence on Perl 5, other languages and other platforms. There are lots of positive things in those aspects. Thus it may be a bare academic languages, nothing dangerous in it.

-- Well, I think we've asked everything we wanted to today. Do you wish to tell something to our listeners?

-- I would like to invite everybody to the YAPC::Europe in Kiev in August. Try to find an opportunity to come. I think, there will be lot of fun and usefulness there.

-- It's almost in a year, isn't it?

-- Yes 49 weeks.

-- The countdown has started.

-- Right.

Week minus 49

09/09/12 17:07 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Written by vti.

As I am in the org team of the next YAPC::Europe in Kiev, I have some good news for you, fellow Perlers! But first a short note about the venue. We started going to the every venue (out of 7 selected previously), meeting the people there, getting all the details we need for choosing the best one. We have prepared an extensive list of the things that must be present, so we won't forget anything. As usual, if you have any suggestions what a venue of your dream must be ping us on twitter. And now to the fun part.

So far we have contacted Damian Conway, Larry Wall and Matt S. Trout and asked if they were interested in attending Kiev. And they kindly agreed! You know these prominent members of the Perl community! Also Matt will be giving a closing talk, I am sure you loved them from the previous years.

Kiev is a great place for Perl programmers from CIS who couldn't come to previous European Perl conferences due to visa issues or the distance. A good chance meeting people we know as authors of great software and books.

This is the end of today's, minus-49-weeks-before-the-conference newsletter. See you next week. Follow us on Twitter.

Week minus 50

02/09/12 17:05 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

There are no dates for the YAPC::Europe 2013 announced yet but assuming a year contains 52 weeks and the conference is planned to happen in August, let's roughly estimate there are about 50 weeks before the conference. We'll just hot fix the numbering as soon as the dates are known.

So what's new about the conference. Believe me or not, we are not sitting and waiting for the end of June to start doing conference preparations :-) We've got intensive discussions in the mailing list to set up the roles among the organisers, launched internal wiki pages and made a brief research of some minor details.

In the following few weeks we will closely look at every of our seven venues that we have in mind. Just to list them:

The Ukrainian House, which is the most attractive by its location place (and thus it is the most expensive one). It's a big conference house somewhat similar to the Riga Congress Centre we had in 2011. Personally I find this place the best fit but let's see how it goes.

Master Class Cultural Center, having a bit messy name when translated to English, is a great place for medium-sized technical events and is located next to Kiev-Pechers'k Lavra.

President Hotel, the place where quite a few IT events were hosted before. It offers reconfigurable rooms which is quite awesome.

Parus Business Centre is a futuristically looking modern building with conference facilities, quite suitable for hosting the conference titled Future Perl.

European University has got a few rooms big enough for the size of the YAPC (not of ::Asia though) and equipment we need. I find that the universities are quite handy for our conferences, we had different events of the YAPC::Russia series, including those outside Russia and Ukraine, held in the universities and I was happy with that.

Conference Services Kiev. The name supposes that the place is specialised on hosting conferences, and indeed they have a number of rooms of different size but are located a bit far from the city centre (still reached by public transport).

Bratislava Hotel is our backup plan (if everything above fails). I'm afraid it is too small for the conference, having the biggest room with 250 seats (let's see if it is reconfigurable).

I hope that we will be strong enough to let ourselves primarily sort the venues not by prices.

This is the end of today's, minus-50-weeks-before-the-conference newsletter. See you next week. Follow us on Twitter.